Just a thought about the riots

Anyone who had given even a cursory glance to PWPL will know there’s no strong sports fan base here.

However, I was reading in the Post about the post-Canucks loss riots in Vancouver and had a thought. The article is called “Fans aren’t off the hook” and describes how it is ridiculous to claim that only a small criminal element is responsible for the riots. The author is right: certainly there were regular Vancouver Canucks fans looting, burning and destroying stuff. It wasn’t just career protestors.

So we know that regular Vancouver Canucks fans were among the criminals. My question is: how many married men with families were among the crowd? “Hey honey, I’m going to be late tonight. Just have to burn a police car.” I’m not saying our dwindling marriage rate is responsible for looting and violence. But marriage does, some theorize, civilize young men. I’d have to guess the numbers of family men among that crowd were low.

I don’t know how “16 or 18 year-old boys should be married” follows from “marriage does, some theorize, civilize young men”… were all the men in the riots 18 and under?

And I’m not sure “marriage makes people smarter” follows from it either. Unless civilized == smarter, somehow. I tend to think of civilized as meaning more aware of one’s responsibilities with respect to others instead of more intelligent.

I think she’s saying that, since marriage necessarily gives one more responsibilities, one is less likely to, say, light police cars on fire. For the most part. Unless you were a lunatic. In which case, marriage probably has little effect.

People scoff/laugh/make fun of this notion of marriage civilizing young men… but there’s been books written approaching the topic from a geo-political viewpoint particularly with regards to China’s missing women. When there is a surplus of young men who can’t find wives, some worry could do harm to our culture and world. Maclean’s recently featured an interview with a scholar by the name of Mara Hvistendahl, who commented on this notion from a different angle.

Seems to me, based on the response to this one blog post (on Facebook, largely) that people are expecting a book’s worth of knowledge in a forum that doesn’t permit that.

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